Monday, July 23, 2012

"Attachments": New Immigration Exhibit at the National Archives

Via National Public Radio, we have word of a new exhibit at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Titled "Attachments: Faces and Stories from America's Gates," the exhibit uses the documents and photographs "attached" to government immigration case files to "tell[] the stories of men, women, and children who found
themselves at the gateways to America between 1880 and the end of World
War II."

When she was in graduate school at the University of California,
Berkeley, in the mid-1990s, [Lee] was researching the Exclusion Era, a
period in which Chinese immigration to the U.S. was severely restricted.

Lee
called library after library looking for primary source material but
came up empty. Then she called the National Archives in San Bruno,
Calif.
"I was expecting the usual 'No, I'm
sorry,' and to my surprise, the archivist there said, 'Yeah! We have
about 70,000 individual immigrant case files that have just been
released to the public'," Lee said.

There
were boxes and boxes of files. Too many to count. The first file she
asked to see was her own family's. When she opened it, her grandmother's
wedding photograph fell out.